[gs-devel] unifined GPL Ghostscrpt 8.01 release

[Ralph Giles]

Hi folks,

It's about time to release the 8.0x version of Ghostscript under the GPL, a year having 
passed from the AFPL Ghostscript 8.00 release.

In a conference call last week, it was decided that Easy Software and Artifex would 
finally merge the ESP fork back with the "upstream" version, as has been discussed off 
and on for some time. The target is to have a GPL Ghostscript 8.01 release ready at the 
end of November.

I'd appreciate any help you could offer in sorting through the various patches between 
the GS_7_0X branch at cvs.ghostscript.com (or just the 7.07 release) at espgs head, and 
getting those ported to 8.0x. In particular I'd like help from the distribution people 
on setting priorities for the various pieces. The minimum goal is a 8.00-based release 
that works with CUPS, but we'd like it remain a nice distribution for packagers.

A brief outline of how things look to me at this point:

- it's possible there are some security issues with 8.00, since a lot were found in the 
development that lead up to 8.10. Ray Johnston will verify whether anything needs to be 
backported.

- most of the autoconf changes are good. I can handle checking them in.

- CUPS raster goes in obviously.

- the stp device will not be included. It's been deprecated by the gimp-print people in 
favor of the ijs (or CUPS) interface for some time, and doesn't build with versions 
4.3.5 and up.

- there was never an AFPL 8.01 release, so there are a probably a number of bug fixes in 
HEAD that will want porting. As usual we'll consider such requests on a case-by-case 
basis.

- some of the changes in esp seem to be spurious or 'quick fixes'. While our acceptance 
policy for the GPL branch at ghostscript.com is very much more relaxed than for HEAD, 
I'd still like to sort some of these out and fix the actual issue the 'right' way. 
Another reason I'd like help with the priorities from packagers.

- the hardest question is I think the plethora of legacy drivers that have been added to 
ESP Ghostscript. I like the idea of having the more unsupported ones in a separate 
contrib/ and of having a centralized distribution of all the various and sundry devices 
that have been written over the years. On the other hand, updating all of these for the 
changes to the color mapping routines in 8.0x (necessitated by devicen support) is a 
fair chunk of work, especially given the testing issues, and we have in general been 
trying to get away from shipping large numbers of drivers and instead take advantage of 
generic and protocol devices to move the drivers out of ghostscript. The previous 
policy with the GPL branch was to only include drivers that did not have a newer 
alternative (gimp-print, hpijs, pxl, etc.) support option, but I'm open to discussion on 
that.

Anyway, let me know your thoughts.

 -r

--
Ralph Giles
GPL Ghostscript maintainer